The conference in Vancouver,
Washington was a great success with approximately 50 attendees
present for the official rollout of the HP49G to a large group.
Jean-Yves Avenard, Cyrille de Brebisson and Gerald Squelart from
HP-ACO were there along with many from the U.S. sales and
marketing operation (Whit Hickman, Jeff Blough, Nycole Chapman,
etc.) to meet the out-of-towners. The entire morning on the first
day was spent with Jean-Yves presenting the HP49 with
demonstrations using both the calculator itself and also a PC
emulator which is part of the soon-to-be-released Software
Development Kit. In order to better show the group what was going
on, HP rolled a cart into the room containing calculators and
distributed one to each and every attendee - to keep. This
definitely raised the mood of the room significantly.

At three different times, ACO's
Cyrille de Brebesson did a two-hour training session on the
upcoming HP49 software development kit (SDK) which will run under
Windows NT or 98. This package will be relased later in September
as an open-source release to developers and will contain the HP49
ROMs.

Toward the end of the second day,
an HP Panel consisting of ACO and U.S. sales/marketing people
fielded questions from the audience. This was very informative.
Also, during the conference a programming contest was held and
the results were tallied on Sunday. John Stebbins was the winner
and took home an HP Jornada 420 palm-sized PC.

One interesting conference
"goodie" was the proliferation of HP49 prototypes which
floated around the room. The ACO folks showed off the original
prototype which was based on a modified HP48GX with an outboard
keyboard and circuit board plugged into one of the card ports.
Someone had gotten photos of several prototypes inside and out
and quickly had overhead transparencies made to show the group.
As these were being "mysteriously" shown, Jean-Yves ran
up and graciously identified all the interesting features and
differences. It was truly a spontaneous and fun time.

A discussion was raised about
another conference next year. HP's Whit Hickman said that they
would be willing to hold it anywhere we chose. By the end, the
group was leaning toward a 2000 meeting in Southern California.

HP49 Operating System On-Line
Updates

Since the HP49G's operating system
consists of a megabyte of flash ROM which is upgradable via a
computer download, an obvious and frequent question was
"when will we be able to do O.S. updates?" The HP
answer was that some time in September, this mechanism would be
put into place along with downloadable files on the HP Calculator
web site. The current batch of machines were shipped with ROM
version C1.05. Currently, the lastest known version is C1.10, so
an update will be anticipated soon. In addition, the software to
do the updates will have to be made available. Whether this
appears in the new connectivity kit or also on the web remains to
be seen.